Mom always said: start at the beginning, and be good to your momma.

Hey there, welcome to the Green Man blog. This is the start of an interesting journey. Over the next five months or so we’ll be exploring the Green Man theme, and the interesting conversation it sparks: how do we make a temporary city sustainable? What’s our relationship to the natural world? How to take what we learn from the playa back into the rest of our lives? And how can we avoid trashing the planet along the way? Oh, and it has to be great art, too. This should be fun, and definitely will be interesting. I’m certainly no expert, but hopefully we’ll all learn something along the way.

Now, to the nut of the thing. Mom always said start at the beginning, and there’s no better place to start exploring the Green Man theme than with the tickets.

If you’re gonna do something, do it right, right? And the people that made the tickets to our event are doing it right. But you’ve got to see it in person to understand it. Go ahead, go grab your ticket off the fridge. I’ll wait….

Don’t have yours yet? No worries, here’s your lovely ticket maven, Nimbus, and a stash of the goods.

OK, now turn it over and read the small print. No, not the part about risk and stuff, the other bits. See, these are made entirely of tree free paper. Specifically, on the first legal, commercially available paper made from North American hemp. It’s mixed in with flax seed hulls reclaimed from production, and the over all post consumer recycled content is north of 90%. Pretty neat, eh? And it’s printed on soy based, vegetable content ink.

But wait, there’s more! The folks we get your tickets from, InTicketing, go a couple steps more. Namely, for every 500 tickets they print for Burning Man, they sponsor a tree being planted, and over years we’ve been working with them they estimate they’ve planted a total of 500 tree that over their lifespans will sequester 1,000,000 lbs of carbon. Not bad. And this isn’t one of those shady outfits that only says they’re planting trees, or counts replanting clearcuts. Uh uh. InTicketing works with Trees for the Future. They’re sending your money to places like Ethiopia, Haiti, and Kenya, where tree planting is being done to reclaim destroyed soils, re-awaken native forests, and support bio-regeneration. Which of course helps preserve communities. And when your tickets come in the mail, its in tree-free envelopes, and the invoices are also on tree free paper.

The kicker? Using InTicketing didn’t cost extra over another vendor. So it’s not a matter of affording to do the right thing, or not. It’s a matter of whether you ( we ) take the time to figure out a better, more responsible way to do something. Or put another way, it’s about whether or not we take the time to be nice to our momma. Earth, that is.

That’s enough for now, thanks for reading. There’s a lot more to talk about, and you should expect this space to update at least every week. Please drop a line, and let us know what you think, and what you’d like to hear more about.

Tom Price is the former Executive Director of Black Rock Solar. Prior to that he was the Environmental Manager for Burning Man during the Green Man theme, and was in the Gulf Coast for six months during the genesis of Burners Without Borders. He's been attending Burning Man since 1997, and he's proud to say that his decade plus streak of breaking down from sun stroke on the playa on day three remains intact.